Sunday, May 03, 2015

Edgar Awards 2015 — James Ellroy on God and dogs

James Ellroy, photos by yourhumble blogkeeper.

I got my New York errands done early on Wednesday, slipped into a phone booth to change into my suit, and got to the ballrooms at the Grand Hyatt a few minutes before anything had started at Wednesday night's Edgar Awards.

At the end of the long anteroom outside the banquet hall, a bald man slouched on a bench, looking not nearly as tall as he does when gesticulating behind a podium.

"Mr. Ellroy," I said. "Congratulations."

"I've met you before," he said, extending his hand.

"You have. Otto's store, when you read from Perfidia."

"Did you enjoy it?" he said, straightening slightly.

"I did. I read it in a week, a solid hundred pages a night."

"That's the way to do it," Ellroy said with an approving nod. "Steady reading, a couch, a dog."

"Except for the couch and the dog, just how I did it."

"Well, they want me in there. We'll talk later."

"I'll be running up, getting in people's way, shooting pictures."

"Shoot away." Another approving nod.

Ellroy talked about dogs again when he accepted the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master award. "My life," he told the crowd, "has been one long journey to commune with the talking dog."

This was — in part, at least — a tribute to his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, whose logo is a borzoi, or Russian wolfhound. Ellroy also said that he sees God in everything, offered the frank literary quotation that "a literature that cannot be vulgarized is no literature at all," and said: "My first words were, `Where's the book?'" and then, with a laugh I took as gently self-mocking, "and `Where's the booze?'"

Seana, that's a good tease, a good opening sentence. For whatever reason, Ellroy remembered this, perhaps because the meeting happened in the smallish setting of the Mysterious Bookshop. http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5EgiVio9r5w/VBtDmpCzrTI/AAAAAAAAN_E/ffQhMAW2ATA/s1600/NYEllroy%2Bn%2Bme%2B2.jpg

Well, it was at a big Northern California booksellers convention many years ago, and he must have met hundreds of people that day alone, and I did nothing memorable. But he was quite memorable. Just a very big personality.

A big personality is right. I would say, too, that unlike with some other authors, his personality and his past are legitimate subjects of discussion because he has made them so much a part of his work and his public persona.

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About Me

This blog is a proud winner of the 2009 Spinetingler Award for special services to the industry and its blogkeeper a proud former guest on Wisconsin Public Radio's Here on Earth. In civilian life I'm a copy editor in Philadelphia. When not reading crime fiction, I like to read history. When doing neither, I like to travel. When doing none of the above, I like listening to music or playing it, the latter rarely and badly.
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